Suddenly, she seemed to realize that they were all frozen—the people on the steps, the people in the parking lot. They were as still as statues and they were all staring at her. She pushed her way out farther onto the steps, clear of the young woman with the hairband. Once she was out there on her own like that, her posture improved. She threw her shoulders back and stood up straight. She seemed to gain two inches in height.
“It’s happened again,” she said, in a stentorian voice that needed no help from a microphone. “There’s another body lying dead in Margaret Anson’s garage.”
PART TWO
PART TWO
One
1
The first thing Gregor Demarkian noticed about Margaret Anson’s house was that it was enormous, a parody of a big old house, with long one-story wings stretching out from a boxlike central two-story core. It looked more like an institution than a private house, except that the low white-picket fence that ran along the road in front of it was so studiedly domestic. The flowerpots in the windows near the front door were studiedly domestic, too, but they looked out of place. It was late fall and cold. The flowers were dead.
The second thing Gregor Demarkian noticed about Margaret Anson’s house was that it was almost aggressively ugly. For one thing, it was painted a garish yellow color with black shutters. The color would have done well on the walls of the kind of nursery school that has become overanxious about its pupils’ self-esteem. For another, the proportions were all wrong. The central core was clearly early eighteenth century. The additions were clearly later. The collection didn’t match. Gregor looked up the long gravel drive to the long garage at the back. That had once been a barn, and it still looked like one. It was as out of place here as a pig would have been, penned up in a mudhole on the front lawn.
“CNN was faster than we were,” Mark Cashman said, turning the police cruiser into Margaret Anson’s drive.
The drive was being guarded by two state policemen. The whole house was being guarded by state policemen. Calling in reinforcements was the first thing Mark Cashman and Stacey Spratz had done after that woman had made her dramatic announcement at the press conference.
“The word zoo doesn’t even begin to describe what we’re going to have,” Mark had said as he hit the phones to make sure that there would be something like a crime scene left by the time they got to the house.
Gregor could see it was a good thing that he had done what he did, too, because the road in front of the big yellow house was clogged with reporters and camera crews, and they were being anything but cooperative. As Gregor watched, a woman in high spiked heels walked up to one of the state troopers and began stabbing him in the chest with her forefinger, over and over again.
“The public has the right to know,” Gregor could hear her saying.
“Crap,” Stacey Spratz said.
The troopers let the cruiser through. Mark pulled it up in front of the barn and got out to look around. Gregor got out, too. It was almost as crowded back here as it was down on the road, but everybody up here was a law enforcement officer of one kind or another. Even the men who weren’t in uniform were law enforcement officers. Gregor knew the type. The bay doors that had been cut into the side of the barn were standing open. Gregor saw a succession of cars inside, all expensive. The barn was full of people, working with concentration—that meant that whoever it was must have died in the barn. But who? Margaret Anson herself? It suddenly struck Gregor as odd that nobody had yet said anything about who or what had died—male or female, old or young.
Gregor went up to one of the bays and looked inside. The body was lying out on the floor, presumably untouched. From where he stood, he couldn’t quite make out its relevant features, but he was sure it wasn’t going to turn out to be Margaret Anson. What he could see was a bright, garishly printed fabric—batik, the style was called, he was pretty sure. Margaret Anson didn’t sound to him like the sort of woman who would wear batik.
Mark Cashman came up behind him, followed by Stacey Spratz. “All right,” Mark said. “I’ve got a handle on it. It’s a woman, name of Zara Anne Moss. She—”
“She was the one who saw the Jeep following the BMW on the night of the murder,” Gregor said. “I remember the name. It’s an odd name.”
“It may turn out to be fake by the time we’re done,” Stacey said. “I talked to her once. She was a littie—”
“Nuts,” Mark finished.
“Nuts,” Stacey agreed.
“Does anybody know what she was doing out here?” Gregor asked them.